Hauppauge's WinCast/TV Intercast TV board

WinCast/TV Intercast [tm] TV board

Watch TV-In-A-Window plus get Intercast Transmissions

For more information | What is Intercast | Sample WinCast/TV window | Where to buy WinCast/TV | VGA compatibility | Pricing | Summary Page | NBC Intercast broadcast schedule

WinCast/TV Intercast TV board overview

Developed by Hauppauge Computer Works, the leader in bringing TV to PC’s, WinCast/TV is a single slot PCI card which has a 125-channel cable ready TV tuner and a video digitizer, plus optional dbx-TV(TM) stereo. It digitizes video and displays the video image in a resizable window on the PC screen. It will also separate Intercast data from the TV signal, and, using Intel’s Intercast browser, will display the Intercast pages in a window alongside the live TV video window.

TV broadcasters creating new and innovative Intercast broadcasts include NBC, CNN, QVC and MTV. Click on an icon to see a sample Intercast page from these broadcasters.

NBC broadcast the 1996 Summer Olympics with Intercast content, and are broadcating the TV show Homicide, the NFL football games and the news show Dateline with Intercast Web pages. Click here for NBC's current Intercast broadcast schedule. CNN is broadcasting headline news and stock quotes (15 minute delayed), while QVC has excellent home-shopping Intercast broadcasts. MTV's Intercast broadcasts include biographies of and interviews with music stars, plus listings of Top 10 music videos and CDs.

Intercast broadcasts are very cool!

Intercast broadcasts look like Web pages, but are sent with the TV show. You do not need to be "on-line" to receive them.
Intercast Web pages are "orchestrated" by the TV show producer. While watching the TV show Homicide, you'll see clues on "who done it". While watching a music video on MTV, you'll see a biography of the music artist.
This new technology can only be seen on PC's equipped with an Intercast receiver. You cannot see Intercast broadcasts on you home TV set! Note: Intercast is not being broadcast in all geographic areas in the U.S. and Canada. Check with your local TV broadcaster or cable TV operator.
Some Intercast broadcasts include links back to the broadcaster over the Internet. For example, if you are watching the QVC Intercast broadcasts on your PC and you want to purchase an item, you can click a Buy This Item button in the QVC page. Your PC will then connect through your Internet Service provider (if you have one) to send a message directly to QVC.

Want more information on WinCast/TV or Intercast?

For more information on the WinCast/TV board, contact the Hauppauge sales department by clicking here: Click here Or call us at: 516-434-1600 or via fax at 516-434-3198

For more information on Intercast, you can go to the Intercast Industry Group home page by clicking here

WinCast/TV gives you live video-in-a-window:

WinCast/TV displays live video in a window by using the PCI Push technique. After digitizing the live video (from either the built-in 125-channel cable TV tuner or the external video-input source) using high quality 4:2:2 video sampling, the digitized video is sent over the PCI bus into the memory of a VGA display adapter, where it is converted into RGB (red, green, blue) video. This allows the digitized video to move efficiently, and takes a fraction of the available bandwidth of the PCI bus.

PCI Push requires Windows 95 Direct Draw support. WinCast/TV is compatible with the following VGA accelerators in an overlay mode, which require (in addition to Windows 95 Direct Draw support) a video port to "zoom" the TV image to full screen:

S3 Trio64V+ and S3 ViRGE 3D
Cirrus Logic 5446
ATI VT and GT series of graphics display adapters,

WinCast/TV will also work with the following VGA cards in "Primary Surface" mode, which means you must be running in at least a 16-bit per pixel VGA mode and the Close Caption software in the Intercast Viewer is disabled:

S3 Trio32/64 PCI, S3 Vision968, S3 Vision 868
Matrox Millenium and Mystique
ATI Mach64
Hercules Dynamite 128 and other ET6000 based VGA cards

There are many other graphics display adapters which might have Direct Draw drivers and will work with WinCast/TV. If you have any questions whether your VGA adapter will work, either contact your VGA manufacturer and ask them if they have a new Direct Draw driver for your VGA card, or contact our Technical Support department. They are constantly testing new VGA accelerators and have updated information.

In the Overlay mode WinCast/TV requires about 1/2 MByte of VGA memory for the high quality YUV 4:2:2 video image. If your VGA card has 2 MBytes of RAM, it can be used with WinCast/TV's high quality YUV 4:2:2 video image at resolutions up to 1024x768 at 16 bits per pixel.

If your VGA card cannot run in overlay mode, either because it does not have enough memory or because it does not have a video port, an image is displayed on what is called the "Primary Surface" of the VGA. To run in "Primary Surface" mode, we recommend that your PC is running in a VGA mode of more than 256 colors (that is to say, 16-bits, 24-bits or 32-bits per pixel). Primary surface mode gives excellent TV image quality, but the full screen TV window is limited to 640x480.

What is Intercast?

Intercast broadcasts combine live television and Internet Web pages (hence the name Intercast: Internet and Broadcast). The TV signal is created at the broadcast site and then transmitted over the airwaves or via cable TV. In your PC the WinCast/TV board splits apart the TV signal from the Web page data, passing the TV to your live TV window and the Intercast data to the Intercast browser.

Intercast Web pages (and other Intercast data such as stock market information) is broadcast in a little used portion of the TV signal called the Vertical Blanking Interval. The Vertical Blanking Interval (or VBI as it is called in the TV Broadcast Industry) is normally used by TV sets as a dead time in the live video signal where the TV set can restore the TV’s electron beam to the top of the picture tube.

The live portion of a TV image is composed of 480 horizontal lines of video. The VBI has 45 blank lines. Up to 10 of the VBI lines can be used for the transmission of Intercast data, and each line can have 35 bytes of data. Since TV signals are broadcast at 30 frames per second, Intercast has the ability to send up to 10,500 bytes per second, or 84,000 bits per second!

WinCast/TV moves the raw Intercast data into system memory and the live video image into the VGA display memory. It does this as a "Master Mode Device", which means that WinCast/TV does not require any assistance from the PC's processor to move the data. WinCast/TV has its own processor to move the video image and Intercast data to your system.

From system memory, the Intel's Intercast browser decodes the raw data, producing HTML Web pages for display in the browser. These pages are standard HTML documents, and can include formatted text plus graphics.

Intercast viewer showing live TV plus Intercast page:

Features of the WinCast/TV are:

125 channel cable-ready TV tuner
PCI bus card with Windows 95 Plug-and-Play support
PCI Push technology for compatibility with many PCI VGA accelerators
High quality YUV 4:2:2 video digitizer
Intercast decoder for receiving industry standard data broadcast in the Vertical Blanking Interval
Complete TV-in-a-window application with freeze frame and image save
Audio output jack for connection to a sound card
External audio/video input source for connection to VCR, DSS satellite receiver, camcorder or video camera
Microsoft Video for Windows capture driver for creating digital video movies on your PC

WinCast/TV is compatible with these VGAs:

S3 Trio64V+, ViRGE 3D, Vision 868, Vision 968, Trio 32/64
Matrox Millenium and Mystique
Cirrus Logic 5446
ATI Mach 64, VT and GT series

Notes:

PCI graphics adapters only are supported. WinCast/TV cannot be used with 16-bit adapters.
Your VGA graphics adapter needs a Direct Draw driver. The WinCast/TV comes with updated drivers for several VGA accelerators. If your VGA does not have a Direct Draw driver, you can either contact the Hauppauge Technical support department to see if one is available, or you can contact your VGA chip or board manufacturer.
We will be updating our compatibility list from time to time as tests are completed on other VGA accelerators.

WinCast/TV will not work (currently) with these VGA cards due to the lack of updated Direct Draw drivers:

S3 Vision 864
Tseng ET4000
Trident VGA cards

WinCast/TVdbx: with high quality dbx-TV stereo:

A high quality dbx-TV stereo decoder for TV broadcasts is standard on model WinCast/TVdbx for superior audio sound quality. This stereo design also includes SAP audio, normally found exclusively in high-end TV sets. As one of the dbx-TV stereo users said:

"I have the Hauppauge Wincast DBX and its awesome listening to CNBC...the financial channel. If I want to listen to my tv in the other room, it is perfectly audible, much better than my regular 27" tv--course that's just the speaker situation. I am using Labtec LCS- 3010's which are good speakers. Will soon upgrade to speakers more worthy of this card though."

Pricing

The suggested retail prices of the different versions are:

WinCast/TV .. $149.-
Win/Cast/TVdbx .. $199. including Dolby stereo

Where to buy WinCast/TV

WinCast/TV is available through CompUSA, Circuit City, Best Buy, OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Fry's Electronics and MicroCenter in the U.S.
Click here for an expanded list of retailers who stock WinTV boards around the world.

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